Day Is a Scab
The room was half full of smoke when I had finished, and the acrid smell of burning presently brought an alarmed housemaid to the threshold.
“It’s nothing,” I reassured her. “I was only doing a little poker-work on this desk.” I replaced the fireiron in the fender, and opened the window to let the smoke out as the maid withdrew.
An uneasy wind was fretting the invisible rhododendrons with the threat of rain on the morrow.
“I’m sorry, Day,” I said to the darkened universe. “But it’s all right now. I’ve burnt it out.”
IX — The English Way
1
The Quartermaster of the Watch pushed aside the tarpaulin cover to the Wardroom hatchway and whistled softly through his teeth. “Mail,” he said to the Officers’ Steward, who stepped out of the diminutive pantry in answer to the summons, and, bending down, thrust a bundle of sodden envelopes into the outstretched hand. It was snowing hard, and the whaler that brought off the Destroyer’s Christmas mail had shipped sufficient water to call for a muttered protest from beneath the sou’-wester of the stroke oar.
“I don’ mind wettin’ my blinking shirt,” he muttered, as he tugged at the oar, “not so long as we brings ’ope ‘an’ comfort. But if them perishin’ mail-bags is goin’ to sit in a pool o’ water—what the ’ell’s the use? No one can’t read a letter wot’s bin soaked in the Norf Sea for a hour!” The whaler’s crew murmured concurrence.
The Coxswain, nursing the mail-bags on his knee with a hand on each and his elbow on the tiller, bade the crew chuck their weight into their oars and mind their ensanguined business—what time he, the Coxswain, would mind his. This admirably adjusted division of labour brought them eventually alongside, and the mail inboard.
The Surgeon Probationer, whose body was buried in the depths of a wicker arm-chair (with the exception of his feet, which were on top of the stove; and his heart, which was in the keeping of the “Wren” driver of an Admiralty car), heard the whaler come alongside and was at the bottom of the hatchway as soon as the steward.
“Gimme the ruddy things,” he muttered, hungrily, and awoke the partially gassed inmates of the Wardroom with a joyous whoop.
“Mail!” he shouted, and dealt the moist envelopes into the laps of the recumbent figures sleeping off the effects of a Christmas luncheon in various attitudes of statuesque abandon.
The Mess awoke bleary-eyed, and fumbled with its correspondence. One by one the forms sat upright; grunts were succeeded by articulate expressions of approval. The Lieutenant (E), who sat nearest the bell, rose to his feet and pressed it fervently. Then he sat down again, ordered a drink, and slit open the first of four fat envelopes. It was from a favourite sister, ætat fourteen, who, having made up her feminine mind that Sir David Beatty’s position in the naval cosmos was one that her brother would fill with more picturesque and efficient completeness, speedily surrounded that officer in a comfortable aura of giggling self-complacency.
The Midshipman R.N.R. burst open a bulging envelope and stepped straightway on to a magic carpet, which wafted him out of the steel shell of a Destroyer’s Wardroom into a Berkshire vicarage.
The Sub sat on the settee with his legs in heavy leather sea-boots and his elbows on his knees reading a letter from a farm in Northamptonshire. The writer of the letter had spent the morning cleaning out a byre, and the early part of the afternoon sorting potatoes. She had then bathed and sat down in her prettiest crêpe-de-chine kimono and a mingled fragrance of China tea and bath salts to the composition of a letter that spread a slowly widening grin of ecstasy across the weather-beaten features of the recipient, who had almost forgotten what a woman’s voice sounded like.
The clouds of tobacco-smoke curled to and fro in the close atmosphere of the Destroyer’s Wardroom, and the silence—save for the rustle of a quickly-turned page or the snicker of a knife opening a fresh envelope—was profound. Then the Surgeon Probationer chuckled hoarsely. It was a profane sound and passed unnoticed; but presently he bent forward and thrust a gaudy strip of pasteboard beneath the nose of the enraptured Sub-Lieutenant.
“Call that nuffin’?” he queried, coarsely.
The Sub detached his soul with difficulty from the seventh heaven, and considered a highly-coloured representation of a robin upon a snowy background, and the legend “Peace on earth and goodwill among men” picked out in frosted letters against a border of holly leaves.
“‘Snice, ain’t it?” said the Surgeon Probationer.
“Fair bit of all-right,” said the Sub, good-humouredly, and resumed page seven of the closely scribbled sheet:
“I am writing this by the firelight, and if only you were here we’d draw up our chairs close and p’r’aps——”
“My Aunt Agatha sent it to me,” continued the voice of the importunist. “Read what’s written on the back.”
The Sub, who was what is called a good mess-mate, turned the pasteboard over rather absent-mindedly.
“Love your enemies,” was written in angular spidery handwriting across the inoffensive surface of the card. The Sub was twenty, but he had known four years of warfare against the Powers of Evil, which we call Germany for short.
“Any relation of Lansdowne or Ramsay Macdonald, your Aunt Agatha?” he inquired, and tossed the card back, to return instantly to a firelit twilight and “p’r’aps.”
The Surgeon looked round the Mess in search of a fresh confidant. The First Lieutenant sat hunched up on his right, holding a bunch of sheets of paper clenched in his hand, and staring at the stove with unseeing eyes.
“Here, Number One,” said Aunt Agatha’s nephew, and smote his neighbour on the knee. “You look as if you wanted brightening up. Read that, my lad! Both sides. Every picture tells a story.”
The Lieutenant turned eyes like those of a startled horse upon the speaker.
“Eh?” he said. He, too, had come back a long way to answer a living voice.
“Read that, my pippin.”
The Lieutenant read obediently, turning the card backwards and forwards in his fingers as if looking for something that wasn’t there. The crumpled sheets of his letter dropped to the deck and lay unheeded.
Then abruptly he laughed; it was not a laugh common to Englishmen, and so disconcerting was the sound that two or three faces lifted from the preoccupation of letter or illustrated paper, and tranquil eyes stared curiously.
“My God!” said the First Lieutenant. “That’s the best joke—the best joke——” His voice dropped low. He handed back the Christmas-card and fumbled blindly for the fallen sheets of his letter. One by one he straightened them on his knees, smoothing out the creases mechanically.
“The best joke——” He rose to his feet with something in his white face that jerked the medical man instantly upright beside him.
“Sit down,” said the First Lieutenant, and there was a note in his voice the Doctor obeyed, because it was something he was still young enough to acknowledge. “Listen,” said the Lieutenant, in hard, dry tones. “You’ve got to share this—you’ve all got to share this.” Papers rustled and every eye was on the speaker. “It’s—it’s too good to keep to oneself. My brother”—he made a little gesture with the letter in his hand—“my brother was wounded—broken thigh—twenty miles behind the line in a base hospital—the Huns bombed it in broad daylight, with the Red Cross flying on every flagstaff and painted on every roof—bombed it in cold blood, and killed thirty-four wounded officers and men and two V.A.D.’s. They killed my brother, and they killed——” He thrust the letter into the limp hands of the Surgeon Probationer. “You gave me something to read just now. Read that! They killed the whitest woman—she was trying to save him—with the Red Cross on her breast—and his thigh broken. Goodwill among men! Love your enemies! Love your——”
The Gunner came across the mess with his heavy tread, his stolid face full of concern.
“No offence, I’m sure, sir,” he said, glancing at the Surgeon. “Mr. Dantham didn’t know—how could he? Nor yet his aunt——”
The tragedy of one is the tragedy of all in a community as small and as intimate as a Destroyer Wardroom; but the innate sense of justice in the Briton’s heart found expression in the Gunner’s inarticulate sympathy. He held no brief for the Hun, but he was the champion of the shocked Surgeon and Aunt Agatha for all her pacifist leanings.
The Surgeon sat with the unread letter in his hands staring up at the First Lieutenant.
“Oh!” he said. “Oh, the swine.” A growl of confirmation ran round the Mess, but no one addressed the First Lieutenant direct.
“Yes,” he said. “Bestial swine. Brutal, bestial swine. If he’d been killed by the shell that broke his leg I wouldn’t have minded. That would have been fair fight; and she—if it had been septic poisoning or disease; those are the risks all nurses run: the enemies they face and fight all day and night. But this!” He spoke in low, measured tones. “If I ever get to grips with a Hun after this——” The mask of icy self-control slipped for a moment from his face. His features worked and his hands made a movement somehow suggestive and brutal.
“Best have a drink,” said the Gunner, soothingly, and as he spoke there was a trampling of men’s feet overhead, muffled by the snow on the thin plating. The Quartermaster’s pipe rippled and shrilled, to be succeeded by a hoarse sing-song bellow. “Boot and saddle” sounded in a cavalry barracks never stirred the stables as that rush of unseen feet overhead, breaking the peace of a Christmas afternoon in harbour, galvanised the Wardroom into sudden activity.
“Stand by to slip from the buoy,” said the Gunner, and made for the hatchway. But the First Lieutenant was before him, bareheaded, cramming his Christmas mail into his pocket as he swung himself up the iron rungs of the ladder.
2
The Commander, who had been standing peering through his glasses for the last five minutes, lowered them suddenly and glanced at the chart clamped on the bracket beside him.
His First Lieutenant continued to stare across the grey sea to the north-west. Day was dawning, and the spray, flung from the reeling bows of the Destroyer, was like a frozen whip-lash on their faces. “Yes, that’s them,” he said, in a grimly ungrammatical undertone. To the naked eye nothing was visible above the ragged skyline, but every man on the bridge was standing gazing intently in the same direction, as if the wind carried with it the scent of the quarry they sought.
The Commander gave an order to the Signalman standing attentive beside the daylight searchlight, and immediately the shutters broke into a chattering “View halloa!”
A blink answered on the instant, where, two cables astern, the second boat in the line followed in the heaving wake. Out of the faint haze of smoke that almost screened the rest of the division from view, one after the other the answers flickered, and then the leader spoke. The lights all blinked back together.
“Signal passed, sir!” said the Yeoman.
“Right,” replied the Commander. He bent over the chart again for an instant, and straightening, gave an order to the wheel.
The leader’s bows leaped at a charging sea, rose shuddering, and fell away from the wind a couple of points; the drone of the turbines below took on a different, higher note. The Commander turned and glanced along the upper deck with a little grim smile above the turns of his worsted muffler. The Destroyer was stripped for the fight, and at the mid-ship and after guns the crews were blowing on their hands and jesting amongst themselves. The Gunner sat astride the torpedo tube glancing along the sights as the twin tubes trained slowly round like ponderous accusing fingers.
“Your brother ain’t going to be long unavenged,” said the Commander to his First Lieutenant, as the latter climbed into the fire-control position. “We’ve caught this party cold!”
The First Lieutenant nodded, unsmiling, as he turned away.
“We’ll sink the lot,” he said. “But that’s too good a death for a Hun. The sea’s too clean to drown ’em in. I’d——” He checked the sentence and busied himself about his fire-control instruments.
Then out of the north-west came a stutter of light. It winked suspiciously, and the Commander laughed, with his hand on the fire-gong key.
“There’s my answer, Fritz,” he said, and before the words were out of his mouth the foremost gun opened fire. “You’re dev’lish good at raiding merchant convoys—let’s see how you take a hiding.” The acrid cordite smoke, as his guns gave reply to the German challenge, caught him in the throat, and his words ended in a cough.
The German Destroyers turned for home, held their course for eight bitter minutes, steaming hell-for-leather and husbanding their ammunition. Their instructions were peculiar, inasmuch as they were ordered to return at all costs to their base. In destroyer warfare the nation that holds command of the seas can afford to omit this bitter clause from its light-craft’s sailing orders; but an Admiralty that knows it can send nothing to the succour of its disabled adventurers perforce plays for safety.
The German flotilla leader, bending over his chart and stop-watch, deluged with spray from falling projectiles, made a rapid mental calculation and realised that this was no tip-and-run business. He had played that game twice and brought it off, and played it once too often. In golfing parlance, of which he was entirely ignorant, he was stymied.
He laid a smoke-screen, and turned under cover of it, avoided a long-distance torpedo by six feet, and applied himself to the voice-pipe connecting him with the engine-room. What he said to the blond perspiring engineer at the other end does not concern this story, because a “browning” salvo at four miles’ range struck his quivering fugitive command amidships, and beat her into a flaming, smoking welter of flying fragments and spouting foam.
His opponent saw things appearing above the smear of that hasty smoke-screen, things that leaped into view against the grey sky and descended again into invisibility. He lowered his glasses, glanced grinning at his First Lieutenant, and gave another order to the Quartermaster at the wheel.
But the Quartermaster was seized with a sudden preoccupation. He was leaning back against a stanchion with the broken spokes of the wheel still in his hands, looking with stupefied amazement at the pulsating jet squirting from his thigh.
“Hand steering-gear!” bawled the Commander, striving to dominate the din of the action with a mechanical shout. He jumped the body of the Yeoman of Signals, sprawled bloodily across the head of the ladder, and stumbled blindly down the iron rungs.
“Give ’em hell, Number One!” he shouted, and caught a glimpse of his Second-in-Command’s head and shoulders above the rent and tattered splinter-mats. “The blighters have got our range,” he muttered, and as he reached the upper deck he saw another torpedo hurtle from the tube and vanish in a cloud of spray.
“Keep it going, boys!” he shouted, as he passed the midship gun. “Give it to ’em hot and strong!”
The gun-layer turned from the eye-piece as he passed and grinned as the smoking breech clanged open. His jumper and jersey were rent from shoulder to hip, and he stanched a wound with cotton-waste while the loader slammed a fresh cartridge home. The Destroyer, temporarily out of control, fell broadside on to the sea; the waves leaped at them and sluiced knee-deep across the deck ere the Commander reached the after steering position and got the kicking hand-wheel manned. The wind carried the sound of cheering to the Commander’s ears, and he glanced over his shoulder to see the rest of the division wheel and go crashing past his quarter in a cloud of spray and funnel smoke. The next astern had taken charge as the leader fell out of line. A burst of shrapnel whipped the after funnel into a colander, and the Gunner rolled into the scuppers, clutching helplessly at a cleat, and slid into the embrace of a curling sea that folded its arms about him and carried him from sight.
The Lieutenant (E) appeared on deck and clawed his way aft through clouds of steam.
“Main steam-pipe, port engine-room’s cut, sir,” he shouted. “Nine knots is the best we’ll get out of her.” He stared ruefully to leeward.
The fight had swept away to the south, and the crippled leader followed, to pass presently across the battle’s trail. Clinging to lifebuoys and scraps of German wreckage were pitiful drenched human beings. Hands waved, white faces appeared in the smooth flanks of the waves or vanished, smothered in their breaking crests.
The Commander jerked the telegraphs and surveyed his rolling deck. “Cease fire!” he bawled, satisfied himself that the battered whaler was still seaworthy, and gave the order, “Away lifeboat’s crew!”
They lowered her, manned by men still breathless with the exultant flush of battle, some with hasty bandages about them, and to and fro they plied amid that tumbling sea and the unmanned foe calling for dear life at their rough hands. The Destroyer turned to make a lee, and along her rail the ship’s company gathered, with heaving-lines and lifebuoys.
A wave passed surging down the ship’s side, carrying on its crest the head and shoulders of a man. His face was ashen grey, and his hands grabbed ineffectually at the slipping coils of a rope’s end thrown from the forecastle. He slid helplessly into the trough of the sea, his eyes wide and terrified, staring at the rows of faces above him.
“’Ere, Fritz,” said a rough voice, “’ang on!” and another rope jerked and fell with a splash beside him. Again the clutching hands went out, but his strength was gone. The white face fell forward—jerked back, gasping and choking—the hands went up.
“Gangway, you fools! He’ll drown!” Two able seamen, leaning over the side—one had escaped from a German prison camp six months previously, and was enjoying himself—were thrust apart; a burly figure in socks, and divested of his reefer jacket, steadied himself with one hand on a davit while he measured the distance, and dived.
“Number One!” gasped the incredulous Commander. “Don’t tell me that’s the First Lieutenant?”
“Yessir,” said the Wardroom Steward, who had been passing up ammunition, with a cigarette behind his ear, and a hastily-collected gallery of lady-loves’ photographs projecting from his breast-pocket.
“Yessir.” Adding, as one in the confidence of the Wardroom: “‘Im as lost ’is brother, bombed by them ‘Uns. Actin’ regardless, you might say.”
The First Lieutenant, treading water, was effecting a businesslike bowline under the armpits of the drowning man, and avoiding his enfeebled embrace with considerable presence of mind.
Finally the two were hauled inboard and the ship’s company raised a cheer.
“Shut up, will you!” spluttered the First Lieutenant, angrily, wringing the water from his sodden nether garments. He avoided the eye of his Commanding Officer.
The ship’s company, under direction of the Surgeon, applied themselves to first aid with all the enthusiasm of victors and amateurs in the gentle art of saving life. The whaler, laden with dazed and bedraggled captives, was pulling wearily up to the quarter, rising and plunging in the steep seas. The business of the ensuing five minutes brought the Commander and his First Lieutenant face to face.
“Funny little fellow, ain’t you?” said the former.
“Bah!” said the Lieutenant. Then added, savagely, “You wait till next time!”
X — The Parting of the Ways
The Light Cruiser that had shortened-in, whose paying-off pendant hung limp from mainmast-head to quarter-deck, asked permission to proceed.
From her berth in the upper waters of the Firth the Flagship was invisible; but repeating ships and dockyard signal station caught the query, tossed it from one to the other till the Flagship had it, and sent the affirmative signal back to the Light Cruiser as her Captain stepped up the ladder to the bridge.
He walked to the rail that overlooked the forecastle, caught the eye of the First Lieutenant, and nodded. The latter raised his arm, as one who had received and understood an order. He transmitted it apparently by telepathy, for immediately the last lengths of cable came grinding through the hawse pipe.
The anchor was weighed, the invisible propellers began to eddy the water round the stern, hoists of flags shot from the lockers to the yardarm, said their say, and descended in whirls of colour; yet everywhere was the same scrupulous economy of word and gesture. Officers and men were performing a task—that of getting under weigh—so familiar as to be almost mechanical; yet, conscious that they were carrying it out together for the last time, gave, as it were, a little exhibition of supreme competency, each for his own soul’s private satisfaction.
The Captain, looking down on it all from the altitude of the bridge, saw that it was good. It was so good that it gave him a sort of lump in the throat. He knew the Chief Yeoman was watching him, awaiting the word that would send their last signal to the anchored remnant of the fleet ahead. Yet now it came to the moment, he hated the words those gaily coloured flags would spell.
“Odd numbered ships and even numbered ships”—thus you address a fleet—“Good-bye.”
He glanced aft and saw the paying-off pendant take the wind of their passage, unfold its sinuous length, and float out into the breeze with the gilded bladder dancing lightly in the smoke above their wake—glanced ahead at their grey “comrades of the mist,” lying patiently at anchor awaiting the summons that would bid them also “return in peace to enjoy the blessings of the land”—glanced finally at the Chief Yeoman....
They passed a Battleship at a cable’s length, a towering mammoth whose superstructures were alive with men. From somewhere forward a man’s voice reached them across the water: “Stand by to give three cheers.... Hip! Hip! Hip!” and a great roar of sound breaking like rollers against the hills of the South Shore, those misty wooded hills whose sameness they had cursed so often through four years of war.
Ship after ship cheered them as they passed. The rows of motionless figures standing stiffly at attention warmed to those cheers. They attributed their obvious gusto to the proud patches on funnels and side, the little Cruiser’s battle scars. They were conscious of a clean record in the canteen ashore and on the upland playing-fields, for these things weigh in the quick reckoning of men’s hearts at parting. But they were being cheered above all for the paying-off pendant they flew. All the world loves a lover, grateful to this ebullition of nature for reminder and promise alike. To the sailor, however, there is no fairer sight than a ship with 600 feet of white bunting floating astern. It may not be his ship, but it reminds him that his turn will come.
A semaphore waved a parting message from a brother Captain: a cryptic jest that wrinkled the corners of the recipient’s eyes; a great man stepped out on to the spacious grandeur of his quarter-deck, and raised his cap with a dignified, half-affectionate gesture of farewell.... And then they were sliding under the towering girders of the Forth Bridge.
Southward ho! With the threat of a north-easterly gale on the quarter to speed their heels: south and west for a night and a day, pricking off the familiar names of light vessels amid the steep yellow waves off the east coast; overtaking Channel traffic creeping out to seas where once more no fear was; red ensigns and white dipping in salute and acknowledgment; with the land like a grey shadow on the starboard hand; with war a grey shadow on the memory, fading fast....
Then, at daybreak, chequered forts ahead: cranes and sheerlegs rising out of the mist about the dockyard, distant spires catching the first of the sun. Home!
The Light Cruiser came slowly up harbour in tow of her attendant tugs, like a victor being escorted to his dressing-room by seconds. On all sides syrens hooted vociferously, ships in harbour manned and cheered, and all about the old weather-beaten brick houses by the water’s edge was the flutter of flags and handkerchiefs: the welcoming cries of women came faintly across the stream.
By the afternoon the ship was in dock, and neither in the Wardroom nor on the mess deck did men stand upon the order of their going. “Leave!” was in the air: it was echoed in hammer blows on packing-cases, in the bumping of portmanteaux as they were dragged from store-rooms: epitomised perhaps by the Engineer Commander, who danced mid plaudits, solemnly and without grace, on the Wardroom hearthrug.
Entered the Lieutenant, Royal Naval Reserve, and laid his suit case, rug, and gloves upon the settee.
“Weel,” he observed, “I’m awa’.” The revolving figure stopped in the midst of a gyration; the onlookers stared: smiles somehow evaporated.
“Going, Jock?” said one blankly. “Going!” echoed the rest. It sounded absurd. The Mess without Jock! The Navy without Jock!
“Aye.” The speaker shook hands gravely with the First Lieutenant. “The war’s over.... Ye’ll no’ want the R.N.R. any longer....” His smile was a forced one, and a chorus of protests and farewells drowned his next words. They crowded round him, wringing his hand, buffeting his shoulders, recalling in allusions and catchwords the familiar intimacy of all these years of war. By comparison the emotions of yesterday’s farewells in the North seemed superficial. They would all meet again, somewhere under the White Ensign.... But Jock was going; their Jock: dour, tough seaman: incomparable messmate. This was the parting of the ways.
“Back to the Mer-r-chant Service—coals an’ bananas.... Maybe we’ll meet again, though.” He made for the door, and there turned as if to survey the mess for the last time. “Eh! But I’ve had a guid time!” He appeared to search his vocabulary for adequate emphasis.
“A bluidy guid time,” he said, and was gone.
XI — Unto the Hills
For two hours the train from Nice had crossed and recrossed the River Var, as if uncertain which bank it should pursue. The journey had been punctuated by stoppages at innumerable small stations, apparently to enable the engine-driver to discuss politics with the proprietors of adjacent sawmills. The guard took no part in these discussions, but remained aloof—albeit within earshot—until his confrère on the engine had scored his point. Then he blew a discordant blast on his horn, the driver climbed triumphantly back on to his engine, and we jolted on to the next political tourney-place.
Where the valley widens the line appeared to make up its mind and to decide definitely for the right bank. The sawmills and patches of Indian corn gave place to orchards and pretty farms; the mountains on either flank of the valley towered to more majestic altitudes. For perhaps the tenth time the brakes screeched, and we came to a standstill beside a deserted platform.
“Touet de Beuil!” said the guard gruffly, coming round to the carriage window. He was a man of few words, who appeared content to rely on the trumpet for any expression of his views or feelings.
“Oui, oui!” he confirmed irritably as I climbed out, slightly incredulous. “C’est ça—Touet de Beuil—V’là!” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the mountains which frowned above us; the horn blared forth a shrill note of defiance, and he swung himself on to the departing train.
I looked up to where he had indicated, and there, sure enough, perched crazily among pinnacles and buttresses of rock, was what appeared to be the stronghold of some medieval outlaw. I detected the brown roofs and quaint gables of a hamlet, apparently accessible to none but the eagles, yet boasting in this land of equality and fraternity a railway station of its own.
Footsteps approached me as I stood adjusting the straps of my knapsack, and one of the inhabitants hurried down the lane on to the platform. Childish though it may seem, I was frankly disappointed. The new arrival was a meek-looking little man dressed in black, wearing a bowler hat. In one hand he carried a gingham umbrella, and under his arm a buff-coloured hen of singular imperturbability. Now a brigand may wear a bowler hat; moreover, he may carry a chicken under his arm, and yet preserve an air of outlawry. But to descend from a mountain fastness that belonged by rights to the sixteenth century and brandish an umbrella at a departing train was carrying the incongruous a shade too far.
True, he swore roundly, as every good brigand should, at having missed the train. But I could not forgive him his gingham gamp.
A narrow gorge struck off into the mountains, and the path, skirting the torrent that thundered below, wound its way upwards. Limestone cliffs with ferns clinging to precarious footholds rose precipitously on either side, and high up, a thousand feet or more, the tops of trees showed up stark against the blue sky. To the brawling accompaniment of the stream I walked for an hour, when the gorge widened into a rock-strewn valley and I came in sight of an inn. In a rubbish-littered courtyard the proprietress was ministering to a stricken pony that lay buried beneath straw in the shelter of an outhouse: she turned at my approach.
I could lunch there—assuredly. She would prepare an omelette forthwith, and François could wait. François had broken his back somehow, and was, as far as I could gather from the lady’s patois and the patient’s appearance, in a baddish way.
The sound of our voices brought a travelling bag-man to the door. My arrival had evidently interrupted his déjeûner, and he courteously postponed its completion to stay in the sun and gossip while mine was being got ready. He was an Italian, and had come from somewhere across the frontier—I forget where—on foot. It was a long way, I remember.
He glanced at my discarded knapsack: “And monsieur is also on the road?” I explained that it was for pleasure, and his eye lit. “Just so—che comprende. And so a man may walk many a long mile, with the sun in his eyes and the wind on his cheek and the noise of running water at his side for company—is it not?” Something of a poet—or at all events a kindred soul, for all he ate garlic “to” his déjeûner and his visit to a barber was sadly over-due.
“And monsieur goes to Beuil? It is but fourteen kilometres: I have myself descended from there this morning. To climb Mounier? A brave adventure”—he flourished his wooden toothpick—“when one is strong, and young. Yes, the snow lies au sommet and the nights are cold là haut.”
We parted after lunch and I resumed my journey along the slope of the valley. Half an hour later the road forsook the more cultivated ground, and, turning sharp to the left, commenced a series of zigzags up the steep side of the cliff. Here the limestone ceased suddenly, and the red rock proper of the Gorge du Cians commenced. It was a dull, deep red, the shade of Egyptian porphyry, and the line of demarcation between it and the limestone of the valley curiously distinct. At the final turn of the path I entered the gorge, and there, where an ancient Roman watch-tower still stood, I turned for a last look down the valley. The sun was gilding the russet autumn foliage, and the poplars along the river-bed stood up like slender golden spires. The fig and cypress still held to their brave, hard green, but elsewhere the vegetation rioted through every shade of brown and yellow. The white road wound away like a thread to the southward, and far off among the trees a curl of smoke showed the inn where I had lunched. It was the second stage of the journey accomplished, and already I had experienced the regrets of a parting, for the Italian bagman with his vile French and muddy gaiters, the companion of a moment, was one who understood the call of
“A shadowy highway cool and brown,
Alluring up and enticing down.”
The Gorge du Cians is a great cleft in the rock, with precipitous sides. The road is cut out of the rock itself and climbs bravely, with the river thundering along three or four hundred feet below it, and the cliffs towering a thousand feet above. It is a versatile road, too: no two hundred yards are straight, and occasionally it goes to earth and tunnels beneath an outflung buttress. In places the gorge is so steep that no vegetation but moss and lichen can cling to its sides. At others it leans back to make a lap, as children say, for a wilderness of trees and some copper-coloured shrub like a Canadian maple. Once it narrowed overhead to a few feet, a mere crevice in the mountains.
Tiny streams trickled down to join the parent stream below, and presently I came to a spot where a veritable cascade poured on to the road from an overhanging ledge. I ran the gauntlet of this crystal shower, and sat awhile to listen to the voices of the gorge. The scent of damp earth and wet greenery, the murmur of the stream below, and a thousand tricklings and plashings, played their part in the sylvan melody. Somewhere surely along this path I should turn a corner and encounter Pan, or view him afar off among the tree-boles where the sunbeams wheeled to mark the passing hours! But I only met, as the afternoon wore on, an old man driving a donkey laden with faggots; though once (I admit with a momentary quickening of the heart) I did see a goat, horned and venerable of aspect, silhouetted against the pale sky.
The afternoon shadows crept higher up the wooded slopes; the air got cooler as I progressed, and when I emerged from the gorge a chilly wind sprang up. The sun dipped out of sight and the broad valley took on a more sombre tint. Here for the first time I encountered the pines, and in place of the red rock of the gorge, sad-coloured limestone appeared between the foliage. Then it was I realised that the wine-red earth and rock had all the while been reminding me of my own Devon, and felt suddenly homesick.
An occasional woodcutter’s hut appeared in a clearing among the trees, and once or twice I overtook workers returning to the village; but it was not until an hour later that I turned a shoulder of the mountains and saw my destination. It was the quaintest jumble of brown roofs and gables, clinging for all the world like a colony of swallows’ nests to the end of a sort of promontory that projected into the valley. No two lines about ii were parallel, and behind, where the ground rose steeply towards the encircling mountains, towered Mount Mounier, snow-capped and ghostly in the twilight. The road wound round to the base of the promontory and entered the village at the farther end. But by following a rocky path I scaled the steeper side, and reached the main street through a labyrinth of steps and alleys as the vesper-bell of the little church stopped ringing. An inn, a wineshop, the church, and a general dealer’s were the outstanding features of the hamlet. The rest of the buildings (to the number of perhaps a couple of score) were grouped haphazard around them. Few lights were showing, and I only saw one person, a woman, who was singing some plaintive lullaby at her doorstep.
An old man at the inn showed me to my room, and while he prepared dinner I strolled out towards a knoll of ground behind the village where a crucifix stood. The woman who had been singing had gone indoors, leaving the night curiously silent. The wind had dropped: a full moon struggled above the fringe of firs, and the shadow of the crucifix took a more definite outline across the tint, where the hoar-frost was already glimmering. In the utter stillness I heard one sound, the tinkle of a sheep bell far off across the valley, and holding my breath to listen better, was aware of the ticking of the watch upon my wrist.
Here it was the village priest joined me. He had concluded vespers, and was taking his evening stroll.
“And monsieur has come all this way to climb Mounier? If the question is permitted, whom has he selected as a guide?”
I explained that I proposed going alone, and he shrugged his shoulders, nodding his head a little. Presently he lit the cigarette I had proffered, and in the flare of the match considered me with grave brown eyes.
“You are young, my son, and when one is young one must needs climb alone, n’est ce pas? One seeks the adventure—the brave adventure....” He sighed. “Then the heart of monsieur must be sound and his sinews strong. But once there, I am told the view is superb, and there is a hunter living near the top who will give you a meal at a moderate charge. The path is not difficult—when one is young and the heart sound....”
“Cinq heures du matin, monsieur!” The old man, who combined the duties of cook, waiter, chambermaid, and maître-d’hôtel, hammered at my door, and I awoke. A thin coating of ice had spread over the water in my jug, and through the open window the stars still shone with frosty brilliance. By the time I had finished a bowl of chocolate and stood outside in football “shorts,” nailed boots, and sweater, the first hint of dawn was creeping over the edge of the hills.
Early as it was, a sleepy teamster was yoking up his horses outside and stamping on the road to warm his feet. I could see the summit of Mount Mounier, 9,000 feet above the level of the sea I had left but the day before. But there remained another 5,000 feet to climb, and 9,000 to descend ere I earned my bed that night. So with a “Good morning!” to the carter (who regarded it out of place and superfluous) I set forth.
The going was easy enough, and I simply steered for the snow-cap. For the first hour or so I crossed cultivated ground, which gave place to turf, cropped like an English lawn by sheep and goats, and finally to rough shale and boulders. The sun rose before I was high enough to see more than the sudden flush on a few isolated snow-capped peaks, but as I climbed steadily the whole panorama unfolded, and the rounded foothills, with their fir-clad slopes and glens, the village of Beuil, the valley up which I had come the day before, all dropped back into insignificance. By eight o’clock I had reached the snow, and could detect far above me a tiny speck where the huntsman’s dwelling was. An hour later, and I heard the unmistakable bark of a dog.
A few wearisome zigzag paths, a struggle up some steps cut in the frozen snow, and I was greeted by a gaunt deer-hound, who sniffed round me and slobbered at my hands. A man came out of a two-roomed shanty of pine-logs and turf. He was cleaning a muzzle-loading gun, and put it down to meet me with extended hand.
“Tu as bien grimpé, m’n ami!” As we shook hands he placed his disengaged one over my heart with the air of a Harley Street specialist and nodded, smiling. “Je t’ai vu, depuis sept heures.... Oui, tu as bien grimpé. C’est un cœur fort.” He was a wiry little man of about fifty, with a wrinkled face, burnt madder-brown by exposure to the sun and wind, a pair of hawk-like eyes, and an aquiline nose. In fact, altogether he looked very like a hawk.
“Mais il faut monter juste au sommet, et après cela le déjeûner, n’est ce pas?” I had not in fact reached the top. A saddle of rock stretched away up another 300 feet to the actual peak, and after a drink of ice-cold water I commenced the final ascent.
A cairn of stones marks the summit of Mount Mounier—a feature not uncommon to the tops of mountains. I sat there, as it were, on a pinnacle, in a stupendous amphitheatre of mountains. The horizon was mountains, the foreground mountains, range upon range, peak after snow-clad peak, stabbing the cloudless sky. The valleys were full of shadows, violet in the depths, claret-coloured—the very tint of lees of wine—as they neared the sunlight. And as the sun rose higher a distant peak would flush rose-pink and pale again. A little wind came from over the edge of the world, the scented messenger of far-distant pine-trees, and passed whispering to another peak ten miles away.
I sat for quite a while musing, as might the gods upon Olympus, over the littleness of man and his affairs; and in truth, with my chin on a level with this majestic array of Nature’s grandeur, some aloofness of spirit was pardonable. In the middle of my Jove-like meditations, however, I saw the figure of my host, 300 feet below, gesticulating.
“But, the omelette...” he protested, when I descended. As I ate and drank he bustled about the hut, voluble in a queer clipped patois; a gossip, removed by choice or destiny 5,000 feet above his fellows, to live in company with his dog in this hut. I looked round it for some clue to his pursuits: a couple of ice-axes and some coils of rope behind the door; a pair of skis in a corner; a shelf for crockery, with a powder-flask and a rosary hanging from a nail. A bed, a table and chair, a charcoal stove, and a few cooking implements: that was all.
After I had finished eating he led me outside, and, pointing with a gnarled forefinger, named one by one the peaks in view. He spoke of them familiarly—as one who refers to constant and intimate companions, but once or twice I had to shake my head in despair. There might have been a wedge-shaped opal-tinted shadow on the far-off haze, but I could not confess to more. The little hawk-eyed man chuckled indulgently.
“Peut-être bien, peut-être bien. Mais j’ai l’habitude, moi.” Generously put, but I felt that I had failed in this supreme test, and it was significant that he no longer tutoyait as at his first rapturous greeting.
An hour and a half later, as I was nearing the expanse of turf on my downward journey, I encountered an ancient of days leading a charcoal-laden donkey: to be more exact, the donkey appeared to be leading him. The three of us halted to exchange amenities, and I proffered the old man a cigar which remained in the bottom of my wallet. The ancient took it readily enough, then looked searchingly round as if we were a pair of conspirators in a drama. I was about to inquire the reason for these precautions when he laid a forefinger to his nose, and half-closing one rheumy eye, whispered huskily:
“Vous êtes contrebandier—oui?”
Twenty-four hours earlier I should have repudiated the suggestion. But after my communing with mountains, and the great solitude of the snows, one man’s occupation seemed as good as another’s. After all, it is not easy to give pleasure to one’s fellows, and if it added flavour to the tobacco to suggest it had been smuggled from over the frontier, then a smuggler I would be.
I nodded darkly, and we shook hands. With very little encouragement I think he would have embraced me. “An adventurous life!” wheezed the hoary sinner as we parted; “ah, but one of brave adventure!”
It was curious how the phrase recurred. First the bagman, then the village priest at Beuil, and now this withered charbonnier. I reached the village (the clock was striking noon) inclined to wonder whether, after all, I was the dull dog I had hitherto decided myself to be. But be it here recorded that this transient doubt I have since ascribed to the mountain air.
Already the hours were forging afresh the links that bound me to the sea, and soon after six I climbed wearily into the train for Nice. The compartment was crowded: nevertheless, at a little station lower down the Var valley, the door opened to admit four new-comers. Votaries of “La Chasse” returning from a day’s shooting. They combined a varied taste in sporting attire with a fine disregard for the precautions usually observed by bearers of lethal weapons. One in particular, who had omitted to uncock his gun, held it so that the muzzle wavered between the pit of my stomach and his companion’s ear. It may not have been loaded, but I was too tired to investigate or expostulate. Shot by shot, mile by mile, they lived through their day again, while the carriage applauded, commiserated, and hung breathless over the tale of prowess. The bag contained one greenfinch. Yet it needed but a glance at the principal narrator’s flashing eye and vivid gestures to realise that none but the most exacting will judge the day by its material result.
I had not even a greenfinch to show, yet I doubt not that the five of us went to bed that night equally aglow with a sense of “the brave adventure.” And when all is said and done, life would smack of the heroic often enough were but our audience a little more appreciative and the stage less cramped.